Mass Animal Death: Fact and Fiction

On the first day birds fell out of the sky. And fish went belly up in the rivers, their blank eyes frozen in long stares. It might have been a local thing, until news came from the next state that more birds had fallen. A day went by, we held our breath. Then word came from the north that more fish, millions this time, had turned up dead…

I’ve finally started that post-apocalyptic novel I’d always been meaning to write. Sadly, these ideas are not my own, but instead are a summary of this week’s news of animal carnage coming out of the American southland: red-winged blackbirds piling up in the town of Beebe, Arkansas (fireworks victims?), dead fish washing up a hundred miles away in a town called Ozark, and then later, more dead birds in Louisiana; and now news of two million dead fish in Chesapeake Bay. (And now more birds dead in Sweden?) Probably not the sign of end times, but a few more of these announcements and we’ll be inching nearer to a Cormac McCarthy doomscape, with:

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.

Pull the covers up close, dear readers, and hope that the scientists can assemble some comfortingly boring explanations for what news outlets are calling “mass bird kills,” “stress events,” and, perhaps best, “mass bird die-offs.” If McCarthy could best capture the chilling condition of all this, then maybe Don DeLillo would be needed to sort out this goofy language of mass dread.

Fish are always frightening in a way, whether dead or alive, but birds, who seem to live conditional lives even in the best of times, are especially unsettling in death. The photo galleries of the blackbirds in Beebe reveal a certain terrifying weightlessness, what Nabokov once distilled as a “smudge of ashen fluff.” Hitchcock might have transformed birds into darting missiles set to destroy, but most birds, even sturdy and mean ones like the red-winged blackbird, seem fragile.

The cold came late that fall and the songbirds were caught off guard. By the time the snow and wind began in earnest, too many had been suckered into staying, and instead of flying south, instead of already having flown south, they were huddled in people’s yards, their feathers puffed for some modicum of warmth. I was looking for a job. I was a student and needed babysitting work, and so I would walk from interview to interview in these attractive but wintry neighborhoods, the eerie multitudes of robins pecking at the frozen ground, dun-gray and stricken—though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken—until at last, late in my search, at the end of a week, startlingly, the birds had disappeared. I did not want to think about what happened to them. Or rather, that is an expression—of politeness, a false promise of delicacy—for in fact I wondered about them all the time: imagining them dead, in stunning heaps in some killing cornfield outside of town, or dropped from the sky in twos and threes for miles down along the Illinois state line.

Photograph: hart_curt, Flickr CC.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.